The next level

The fascists and the self-interested camp followers are working up to their campaign to "destroy the left" and its "terrorism networks" and we accept the threat is real because we seem to have finally embraced Maya Angelou's famous quote, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." As I remarked a little while back, "It is possible to overstate their power; it is not possible to overestimate their intentions."

But I also have a next-level concern, beyond the coming attempts at repression, that I wanted to raise, one to be filed under "be ready for the fallout from unintended consequences, even if they’re not your own."

It's what happens when the MAGA Masters can't make good on their promises to "destroy" the left? Because they won't. They can't. Oh, there may be, probably will be, some show trials or at minimum multiple prosecutions; there will be a lot of "investigations" and a surfeit of accusations; there will be repression of speech and assembly; there will be a lot of pain for those directly and the much greater number indirectly impacted - but no, while the left may even be significantly injured it will not be "destroyed." We survived the Palmer Raids, we survived McCarthyism, we survived the conspiracy trials of the 60s, we will survive this. Maybe scarred and limping, but alive and continuing and re-building. And truth be told, every time we have gone through one of these cycles, at the end of it the country is a little better than it was before. The moral arc of the universe and all that, I suppose.

So anyway, getting back to the point, what happens when after the MAGA Masters have gotten their rabid followers all pumped up, they can't produce the ultimate victory they promised? How far will they go, how desperate will they be, to keep that loyalty, to hold that blind commitment?

And will those followers try to make that victory come true on their own? It wouldn't be the first time that leaders of a movement lost control of their creation. We've already seen it here on a small scale in the refusal of some of the MAGA crowd to accede to the attempts of the Orange Overlord and company to drop the whole Epstein file business. So yeah, that could happen.

If it does and the MAGA Masters start to lose control, lose their grip on the formerly obedient, will those Masters turn on their own followers? Again, it has happened before.

And don't anyone tell me "that'd be good" because now we're talking about literal blood in the streets and guerrilla warfare and if you think that wouldn't affect you, wouldn't come to your door (it's often been said, with cause, that civil wars are the worst), you're an idiot.

This doesn't mean, of course, that other than the moves at repression this will happen. Of course and yes it's a string of "what ifs." I only raise it as a scenario for which we should be prepared - because even if you think it unlikely, you, I think, have to agree it's plausible.

And I raise it for another reason: to remind ourselves that, in another old but true phrase, the best defense is a good offense. The more strongly we today, now, don't just defend our rights but press our commitments to justice, the more strongly we don't merely say "no" to what shouldn't be done but also say "yes" to what should, the more prepared we are to sacrifice in the present for the sake of the future, the sooner and more clearly we can show "destroy the left" to be the pipe dream it ultimately is, the less pain there will be in the end to us and, more importantly, everyone else.

So carry it on. Except more.

Speaking of Kirk

What follows is rather meandering and I probably should go to bed and do it tomorrow, but I'm worried I would cool off to much by then. So with that warning and the understanding that I may feel compelled to edit this later to straighten out spaghetti syntax, I'll proceed.

When anybody among the wingnuts of the right says anything about "free speech," you can be pretty damn sure that they mean free speech for them but not for anyone else.

If it wasn't already obvious, the wave of firings, suspensions, and other penalties we've seen imposed on workers for failing to react in a MAGA-approved manner to the killing of the sexist, racist, xenophobic, trans-hater that was Charlie Kirk drove home the point.

Well, here's another example: Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau is urging people to respond to Kirk's killing by reporting to the State Department people "who glorify violence and hatred" so officials can "undertake appropriate action." What constitutes such “action” is left unsaid along with how far it can and will extend.

Why is that concerning? For one, the meaning of "people" is curiously limited to "immigrants and foreign visitors." That could be taken as an admission they can't touch US citizens, except that stripping citizens of their passports is already under discussion, the DOJ is "is aggressively prioritizing efforts" to denaturalize citizens, and there is the on-going effort to repeal birthright citizenship - so that admission-that's-not-an-admission is at best cold comfort and the phrase "can't touch US citizens" must be modified with "yet."

For another, while the meaning of "people" is curiously limited, the meaning of "glorify" is curiously broad, embracing "praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event," none of which need describe anything approaching "glorify." "I'm glad he's dead" isn't "glorifying" the murder, "he made his name spewing hatred so we can't be surprised if he generated a hateful response" certainly doesn't, and "I guess if he'd used a hammer instead of a rifle it would've been okay," while crude, likewise doesn't make the cut.

The real point, however, is that none of that matters even if any of it actually did "glorify" the murder because all of it fits quite comfortably under the banner of the "FREE SPEECH!" the reactionaries will screech at the least challenge to their vile and often enough violent rhetoric. Because that human right does not rise or fall depending on citizenship or even legality of residency. It is a right, not a privilege to be dispensed to a favored few.

But not as far as the right wing is concerned, oh no. Note that Landau's whole premise by definition excludes anyone who has used Kirk's death to issue calls, no matter how violent, for "war" against those in any way on the left, regardless of their status as "immigrant or foreign visitor" or citizen. As long as it is said in praise of Kirk, it's fine.

Well, sauce for the goose and all that and if anyone objects to you having excoriated Charlie Kirk in death for the execrable person he was in life they should just be told "It's free speech. Do you believe in it or don't you?"

Trans killers? Or killers of trans rights?

So it's being reported that senior officials at the DOJ are talking about a possible federal ban on transgender folks owning guns.

This is building on the right-wing meme machine's notion that trans folks commit a disproportionate number of mass shootings and the ban would be justified on the grounds that people with gender dysphoria are mentally ill and unstable.

If this were a rational world, it would be enough to simply dismiss this as the twisted fantasies of trans-hating bigots politicizing a tragedy to advance their paranoid fears and political ambitions - but unhappily, it is not.

So let's go through it. Note at the top that I’m not going to bother with any arguments about “but the Second Amendment,” questions that seem to be the focus of too many words on this because, y'know, guns and freedom and all that. Not only because I’d be happy to see that widely misused and historically misinterpreted provision dumped from the Constitution, but because it’s actually irrelevant. Instead, a few facts.

1. Gender dysphoria is the stress that arises when there is a conflict between someone's sex, based on their primary and secondary sex characteristics, and their gender, that is, their sense of self. It is not a mental illness. In fact, therapists will often prefer the term “gender incongruence” specifically to affirm that the issue is one of dealing with stress, not in any way one of sanity.

2. Not only are trans folks not over-represented among mass shooters, they are if anything underrepresented.

Snopes and Media Bias/Fact Check both looked at the question of a supposed overabundance of trans mass shooters and the conclusion was the same both times. Snopes called it "False" and Media Bias/Fact Check bluntly called it a "Blatant lie."

The primary sources for each were the Gun Violence Archive and the Violence Prevention Project, which use somewhat different measures for inclusion. The Gun Violence Archive records mass shootings, meaning a shooting in which at least four victims are shot, not including the shooter. The Violence Prevention Project tracks mass killings, one in which at least four people are killed, again not counting the shooter. Despite that difference in focus, their answers to the overall question were the same.

The Violence Prevention Project recorded 195 mass shootings committed by 200 people between 1966 and 2024. Of those 200 shooters, only one was listed as transgender. That's 0.50% of the shooters.

The Gun Violence Archive reports that from January 1, 2013 to August 29, 2025, there were 5,729 mass shootings - involving just five confirmed transgender shooters. If you include a few cases in which the gender identity of the shooter was unconfirmed, there may have been eight. That's between 0.09% and 0.14% of all mass shooters in the GVA database.

So transgender folks, who by varying estimates make up about 1% of US adults, make up something between 0.1% and 0.5% of mass shooters.

Which means that to what should be no one’s surprise, the Department of Injustice is either lying or so wrapped up in their paranoid hatred that they can’t even count.

Meanwhile, cis men, who make up about 47% of the US population, commit about 96% of all mass shootings. What were you saying about over-representation?

We need to talk about the "Unitary Executive"

A couple of seemingly disparate points that will come together in an unholy embrace:

First, there have long been philosophical debates among Constitutional scholars about the role and nature of the office of the presidency, which are not as defined as those for Congress.

The debate has revolved around two lines in Article II: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President” (Section 1) and the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” (Section 3).

The latter provision, it has been argued, means that the role of the president is to carry out, to execute, the will of Congress as expressed in the laws. Through the veto power, the president has a say in what the laws are, but once a law is passed, that say is limited to what Congress allows - somewhat like a CEO subject to oversight by a board of directors. In its extreme versions, the president is reduced to little more than a functionary of Congress.

The former, on the other hand, claims that “as night follows day,” in the words of one advocate, giving the president “the executive power” means giving them direct and personal control over all matters that could be considered executive functions, including those related to staffing and the heads of agencies, distribution of funds, establishment and administration of regulations, and more. In addition, any federal-level board or agency carrying out any executive function such as regulatory oversight or enforcement is likewise under the president’s control, as are, therefore, their staffs.

That theory of the presidency is known as the “Unitary Executive”* and perhaps because of the enormous amount of power this would concentrate in one person’s hands, it was long considered a fringe theory, only to emerge from the shadows in recent decades, particularly since about 2010.

Okay, point two is that the Supreme Court has something called the “emergency docket,” where it takes up “emergency” appeals of lower court rulings, usually injunctions of some sort, in cases where the issue is at least supposedly of such immediate and pressing importance that it can’t wait to go through the normal appears process. The rulings are made without a full briefing, without oral argument, and, it appears, often with the justices discussing them at all. It seems to often be just “Here’s the appeal, how do you vote?”

The decision is issued often without any legal reasoning and frequently with no record of who voted which way. Because of the opaque nature of the whole business, this “emergency docket” is often called the “shadow docket.”

Point three is a Supreme Court decision called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. The case dates from 1935 and in it, the Court unanimously held that Congress has the authority to create independent agencies, not under the direct management of the president, and to insulate their members from presidential removal unless a good cause for the firing existed.

Okay, how do these points come together?

Over recent months, various federal courts, at both district and appellate levels, have blocked the Orange Overlord and his minions from carrying out mass firings and mass deportations, kicking trans folks out of the military, cancelling various grants, moving to dismantle the Education Dept., undermining birthright citizenship, trying to take over various agencies by firing their boards or administrators, giving DOGE’s (pronounced “dodgy”) band of grizzled veterans of high school access to our personal data - and more. And SCOTUS has repeatedly used the shadow docket to get rid of many of those injunctions, letting King Spray Tan continue his rampage. (It should be noted - while unnecessary to say - that almost all of these were by votes of 6-3, so “who voted which way” isn’t exactly a Final Jeopardy!-level challenge.)

Most recently, on September 8, they declared both that a)Rebecca Slaughter, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, can be, sure, why the heck not, fired and b)that those roving bands of masked government thugs can continue to strut around LA assuming anyone non-white who happened to be near, for example, a car wash is a potential “worst of the worst” “illegal alien” to be assaulted, cuffed, and hauled off - y’know, just in case.Um, but hold on a sec there. By any rational standard, in at least a great portion of those cases there is no “emergency.” There is no irreparable harm to either the Big Brother-wannabe in the White House or his coterie of clowns if courts freeze things in place during appeals - which is the idea behind an injunction. Indeed there is no harm to them at all, except to their egos and dreams of unrestrained power. So why were these on the shadow docket at all?

Perhaps even more to the point, a good number of these rulings are in stark contradiction to the Humphrey’s Executor case, the one which found that Congress could put precisely the sort of limits on Executive action that the Scurrilous Six (AKA the SS) are allowing.

“Piffle,” the SS reply. “We’re not deciding these cases. These are not final decisions.” Oh, yeah, that’s right. They are just “while appeals continue.” No harm, no foul.

Except, of course, to the irreparable harm that is done to those who, to name a few, will be kicked out of their jobs or their careers or the country, the irreparable harm done to scientific research, to health care, to the environment, the irreparable harm to the aspirations for justice among those, like trans folks**, who are stripped of anywhere to seek it if “the Messiah of America” (as wild-eyed Xian fundamentalist Shane Vaughn calls him) is given continued free rein. Or reign.

Which is the real point. In a technical, legal sense, it’s true, these actions are not final. But in a practical sense, for those people and agencies impacted they are.

And it’s more than that, which is the ultimate point I wanted to make, what brings this all together. Because it won’t be the end. By consciously choosing to allow the slaughter of reason, of ethics, of functioning government agencies built up over decades to continue, by empowering the mass firings, the mass deportations, the stripping of rights, the destruction of independent agencies, and doing it all in direct defiance of 90 years of Supreme Court precedent, these reactionaries in robes, the Scurrilous Six, have de facto embraced an extreme version of the Unitary Executive, one in which, as a mirrored version of the alternative that could make the presidency just a functionary of the Congress, could and if they have their way would make Congress little more than a piggy back for an Executive Branch controlling all the levers of power in the federal government.

So don’t be fooled for a minute, a second, by the “while appeals continue” blather. I see no reason to think that if and when an appropriately useful case gets to them, they will not contrive some reason, some justification, for kicking Humphrey’s Executor to the curb in favor of centralized power, even if that power is not in the hands of our present pretender to a nonexistent throne.

This does not mean give up, it does mean stop going to the federal courts, if only because SCOTUS can’t take up every case, with some wins at the district and circuit levels having gone unappealed for just that reason.*** And it definitely does not mean not hitting the streets or ignoring state-level pressure and organizing.

It does, however, mean that this is the reality of the legal universe in which we are operating and we have to be prepared to fight on that basis.

I gave a much-shortened version of this to a group of folks with who I join in a weekly rally and was chided by one afterwards for not including something hopeful. I’m afraid on this matter I don’t see a lot of cause for hope at least in the short make that middle run - but I will say it makes whatever we actions we do take even more vital.

*Curiously, the term originally arose in the discussion at the Constitutional convention over if the presidency should be held by one person or a council.

**If you’re one of those “LGB without the T” folks, do you really think that if the fascist reactionaries who dream of, to quote George Will, “back to 1900" do succeed in driving trans folks out of society, do you really think you won’t be next? Really? At a time when right-wing voices are starting to openly talk about overturning Obergefell and two members of SCOTUS say it should be “re-visited,” do you really think that? Really??

***To the contrary, it suggests filing more suits, as many as can be justified and maybe some that can’t, flooding the system with more cases and findings than SCOTUS would have the room on its docket to overturn even if the SS wanted to.